The present invention relates to image pickup apparatus such as, for example, digital cameras and more particularly to image pickup apparatus, methods and programs with a function to create a composite image from a plurality of frame images.
Some prior-art image pickup apparatus such as digital cameras have a composite-image creating function. For example, Published Unexamined Japanese Patent Application 11-205666 discloses picking up images of objects near and far such as a person (as a central object) and a landscape present behind the person (as a background object) by setting strobe-light emission quantities optimal to the respective objects, extracting optimal-brightness image portions from the respective images, and then combining them into a composite image.
Published Unexamined Japanese Patent Application 5-224285 discloses a multi-image pickup technique for creating such a composite image in which the position of an image of an object picked up previously is indicated specifically within a finder, thereby preventing superimposition of an image of an object to be picked up next on the image of the object picked up previously.
The above prior-art image pickup apparatus, however, simply creates a composite image by combining a predetermined number of (usually, two) images respectively picked up, and cannot create various composite images in such a manner that each composite image is obtained by combining any number of successive ones selected from a plurality of frame images successively picked up.
A prior-art image pickup apparatus of this type is capable of adjusting the shutter speed to any desired value for pickup purposes. However, once a shutter speed is determined, images such as would be obtained at various shutter speeds cannot be obtained.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an image pick up apparatus, image processing method and program capable of creating various composite images easily using a plurality of images obtained in the successive image pickup, and also creating various images such as would be obtained at different shutter speeds even after the image pickup has been completed.